Luke: A Study
by pOnDeReSqUe
Summary: Three vignettes for the price of one, all revolving around dear old Luke, pre6th Season character abolishment. Read and review. I command you.


**Well,** here's a story to keep you occupied with. I wrote it a few months ago and was like, "Meh. Do I really want to post this?" But I came across it... well, about ten minutes ago, and decided it had potential. It's basically three tiny stories revolving around Luke (REAL Luke, not PodLuke), the first one being about his mother, then Rachel, then Liz. All three are in this chapter; I decided it would be more fair that way, as they really are quite small. Anyway...enjoy.

**Disclaimer:** Not mine. Shocker, yes?

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1.**

He's twelve and lanky and on the verge of becoming himself. Tomorrow he will blush at the sight of his half-naked younger sister, her ruffled underwear pooled around her ankles as she pulls on one blonde pigtail; next week he will turn away when his father gives him a rare brush of lips on the forehead. But today he's only slightly ashamed to admit that he's concerned about his tired mother, her spindly wrists and sweaty curls.

"Luke," she hums. It's a meaninglessly pretty sound caught between breathy exhaustion and dreaminess, the pleasant side of sleep-deprivation and its other half. "Luke?" She opens one eye against the light. He catches them in the mirror, mother and son, identical eyes, roles reversed. He imagines this snapshot of them in a Hallmark frame; a pitiable situation, eliciting slow head shakes. A story that would land somewhere in the middle of the early-morning news, a thoughtful son, his eyes furrowed; his dreamy, amused, cancerous mother, encased in glass and Hallmark lies.

"Yeah, mom?" He pushes a curly strand of her hair up her forehead but it falls even lower on her face, landing next to her eyelashes.

Her lips muffle her groan as she sits up on her elbows, a faint smile and a brief, kind glance at her son distracting the light from her transparent skin. A patch of light looks unnatural on her; toasted yellow sunlight turns to the thin, artificial light that radiates from bare light bulbs.

"Tell your dad that the Red Sox have gone fifty years without winning a series," she winks at Luke, and he smiles back; they share this joke; his father's petty insistence that the Sox will get their win, and soon, alright, "And if he picks his lazy ass up and goes grocery shopping to get that milk we dearly need to sustain Liz, then maybe he can live to watch the next fifty winless series pass." Her blue eyes are wide with sudden vivacity, annoyance and amusement.

In the next room he can pick out a brief chuckle in the generic roar of their television. "Luke!"

"Yeah, dad?"

He almost enjoys this, being the silent messenger. He does nothing, absolutely nothing, but he knows that by existing, standing equally distant from his dying mother and gruff, sad father, he serves a purpose he can't yet define. But they're smiling, and she's only coughed once, and even though a wall separates them they're together, they're closer than they were two years ago with their hands clasped white- two people with eyes in different states of emptiness.

"Tell your mom that the Sox are up five runs to two, fifth inning, and I'm not getting milk for that kid at Doose's. I swear, that man is trying to poison us. Might as well steal one of the Maxwells' cows and shove it down her throat."

"Will," her voice warns, toying, her head sinking down into her pillows. "You bought that day-old sushi willingly."

A grunt. "And I live to regret it."

She rolls her eyes at her son, reaching up to ruffle the cowlick he's been trying to grow out.

"William, you-" but what begins strong ends in a cough, and he can almost see the fine spasm of pain that shocks her torso, fraying out in thin lines that clench her nerves. She turns her head quickly when she tries not to wince; her insides are melting, crashing, her cells growing hard and impermeable to brainwaves as her outside manages only to decay, decay around the problem that won't die. Her hair comes to rest, a fluid mess of light brown, on the blue cotton shirt Luke got her for Christmas last year. He sees it and the familiar pebble of blame hits the bottom wall of his stomach. He's always felt guilty about it, the money he spent on candy instead. The shirt had cost five dollars, but there was a seashell necklace that was seven, a dollar too much, the dollar that had become the shameful crumb of chocolate in the corner of his mouth. She's always liked the ocean.

"Will," she sighs, loudly, defiant toward the voice which threatens to betray her, to float again to that insistent state of enervation. "Will, get the milk."

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**2.**

Paul and Brian whistle at something behind him, raising their eyebrows reverently, patting him on the shoulder. A flicker of possibilities run across his mind quickly, a series of large-breasted girls with inappropriate skirts and lip-lined pouts he's noticed eyeing him lately, tracing the lines of his pecs through his embarrassingly skimpy track uniform. Crazy Carrie and her posse, the kind of girls Paul and Brian would whistle at. But it hits him and he accepts his own half-curl of a smile as hands float around his waist and pull him back abruptly. He rotates his body and pulls her into his chest, breathing in her cinnamon hair, which smells, in a word, simple. Clean. Here's the only girl at Stars Hollow High who would elicit two whistles in ten seconds that doesn't underestimate the power of plain bar soap.

"Mm. Hi, Luke."

"Hi, Rachel."

She glides away from his body and her fingers slide down his arms and trap his palm underneath hers; he spends a dazed second studying the pattern of freckles on her hand, and then let his eyes dart to her own. Here he greets a first; he is grinning and she is not. He's disappointed, though in that moment he can't recognize it; it feels like she's been waiting for him to do this for months. And here he is, extending his hand to hold, not bothering to hold up that famous stoic mask of his, his eyes set in unreadable calm; the one everyone says is handsome but he knows is just a locked door he carefully built himself to shut everyone out. No, she's the one pushing him away.

"We need to talk." He pulls his hand away quickly, mask up now and eyes averted. He has never trusted those words, not after so many movies he's watched with Liz, with pretty, doe-eyed girls and their sneers, not after his mother. _We need to talk_ is a death sentence with the people you love holding the needle, not an invitation, as one would presume, to actually converse.

They end up in the empty cafeteria, colorful nutritional signs with multicultural cartoon children insisting loudly they eat fruit and vegetables with every meal on either side. Taylor's doing, as is the cheery color scheme: yellows, oranges, and reds, with a mural on one wall, dancing oranges and apples, a banana with his white-gloved hands extended in mid-back-flip. It is a horribly ironic place to have a conversation that begins with "We need to talk."

"Luke."

"Rachel." He lets out a low, stuttering laugh; he can't help it, he's nervous, and her hand is still on his thigh.

"Look," she begins, offering him a small smile, a dash of pity thrown in. "I'm leaving earlier than I thought."

"To where? To New York?"

"No."

"But…"

"I got into a program in London, Luke." It hits him sharply, but after the moment's shock, he realizes he isn't surprised at all. London, London… an ocean away and she's never been very good at keeping track of people, getting so desperately lost in the singularity of her vision, the passion she builds up in honest stones behind every thing she does. The girl with the future, the strength to recognize the failings of falling in love with a boy who still hasn't applied to colleges, who remains so infallibly loyal to his grieving, stubborn father; his flaky, adoring little sister.

"London, huh?" He looks down at his hands, trying not to sound bitter, but he does; his voice is clawing at the air between them.

"Yeah," she says. "London. I'm leaving next week to find an apartment, a few days after graduation, I just need to straighten a few things out at home. Look, this is for the best. For me."

"Yeah. For you."

"And maybe," she tries, struggling to keep his eyes pinned on hers, "The best for us, too."

"What's that supposed to mean?" He's poised to stand up and walk out, his hands levitating over the edge of the table.

"We can test our relationship, Luke. We can survive this."

He gets up, his head shaking furiously. "No. No, we can't."

"Luke-"

"You're escaping Stars Hollow next week, and that's fine, I can't control that. It's your nature, Rachel. It's always been your nature. But I am Stars Hollow. I'm not the boyfriend you pity and then forget about while you're climbing rock walls and visiting the Louvre."

"But…" She stands up.

"No."

Fine. Fine, he knows she is thinking. She won't push harder than this. She places her palms flat on the table, leaning over toward his face, her hair a red curtain, kissing him firmly on the cheek. "I'll miss you."

She doesn't wait for him to reply, walking out of the room, doesn't look back. He knows she won't cry, that tonight she'll probably pack and think of him already as a friend she once had, a friend that made her laugh and touched her hair and kissed her so right she had to laugh against his lips, against his chest, at the misconceived perfection of it all; isn't it a pity that circumstances got in their way? He knows it's not her nature to regret. He wonders whether this comforts or disappoints him.

"Yeah, me too," he says, hands in his pockets, to the ecstatically back-flipping banana. "Me too."

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**3.**

Her phone calls, once sporadic at most, have taken a nosedive in the past months- grainy reception at odd hours of the night, her declarations of happiness given in a voice wavering between dry heaves and giggles. Conversation-length varies; an hour describing the grand loveliness of New York, her friends (all "wonderful people" at first, they soon disintegrate into their ugly, evil twins), wacky political concepts he's sure she sketches with markers in her head between third and fourth joints (one including a scheme to get every homeless person in the city to overthrow the presidency with their shopping carts). It's that or it's thirty seconds of terse, almost breathless words.

"I'm fine," she'll snap, when he doesn't ask anything. "I'm fine, Luke, I'm doing better." And then she'll hang up, relieved, as if reporting her state to her brother was her duty, an errand like getting gas that is, yes, necessary, but infinitely irritating. Like she wants to get it over with quick so she can escape the guilt, which has always existed, the product of too much love when she was already spoiled and eight and a brat and stole ice cream bars. Like ripping the band aid, but she always took comfort in knowing the band aid existed- her big brother, who, like her father, could never seem to let go of responsibility.

Today she announces she's pregnant, in a voice, that, while oddly upbeat, is free of emotion. It's the first thing she says in the receiver. He wishes she'd led into it with a dabble of small talk, or a hello, or a pause between the "I'm" and the "pregnant," a small break in between the mediocrity, the normalness of the first word and the unrecognizable strangeness of the second. A lead up to the announcement, which has now shunted its way awkwardly between them, a thick barrier of unspoken words; questions he wants to ask, the answers she'll give in words pounded in stingy bullets of resentment or anger, both born of guilt. But she was never one for subtlety, the girl who either loves you or she doesn't.

So, words unspoken, she explains. It was Jimmy, that guy she met; he has a job, she assures, it's steady; we're getting married. It's a boy. They only found out when she started to show, they thought she had the flu, and Jimmy took her to the clinic. It's a boy. She keeps repeating this solidifying fact: it's a boy. It's not just an it anymore; given a gender, it suddenly has his father's dark eyes and her tolerance for cheap champagne. She admits, with a smile in a voice (he can't tell if it's fake; her sunniness has always masked everything) that a girl would've been nice, a girl with hair to braid.

But he knows the hair would have gone unbraided, it would have knotted three inches in and the teacher in the girl-that-could-have-been's class would see it and wonder. Liz would forget. She would get wrapped into herself; she has a tender spot for petty obsessions. The daughter would last eight weeks, a novelty with naïve eyes so easily manipulated she'd become anything for Liz, another pretty thing wrapped around her well-meaning finger, and then sit in an empty kitchen, the occasional receiving ground for ready-made baby food. Plans that he knows will fail and push her in ways she's never been pushed before, and to Liz the unfamiliar has always been the trusted route; familiarity means the ends she's seen in her life; her mother's death, her father's. She swerves around the inevitable persistence of these events in her life. She has forgotten that her escape routes are escape routes, notices only as the habits she's always had, sees them as traits, as easy and untelling as shoe-tying. When is the last time she saw her mother's grave, which Luke places a spring bouquet upon religiously, in his fretting, solitary way? Her birthday, which is May 5th, never a day he'd rather go fishing; Christmas, he remembers the callow lilies that were her favorites, even sees the shy, gradual angles of her face when he spots one in the market, unnoticed next to the roses.

"Luke," she says, biting her lip, where a cut already exists, fine and dark like a tear. She's been biting her lip lately, a habit she broke at six, a habit that's coming back to haunt her. "I can do this. Don't worry."

His fingers pluck the coil of the phone line. "It's a boy." He sees the future in that moment, at midnight speaking in the pop of grainy reception: dark, unforgiving glances, Liz's face pushed together in earnest, innocent worry. What's wrong with him? What's wrong with him, my boy, what happened? What did I do? She'll ask, and he'll be there, in his dark misguidance, so torn but made out of stone. His mother's love, which was brief and fierce as a thunderstorm, rare, that crackled on his skin in the air between, was never enough.

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Well, let's hope you enjoyed it. Now it's time for some love. No, not _that_ kind. Geez. But reviews would be awfully nice. 


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